Inflammation works like a hand on a clock: when it's strong, the body ages faster. Scientists have found a way to see that hand. They took 127 genes that switch on during inflammation and looked at the chemical marks next to them. Those marks can predict a person's age.
Then the scientists tested this clock on cancer cells. It turned out that cancer pushes the hand forward: the cells look older than they really are. And when the cells were returned to a young state, the hand moved back. So inflammatory marks can be erased, and inflammation-driven aging is reversible.
Now researchers can build such clocks for any genes through the GeneClock Studio website. This will help track aging in various diseases and check whether treatments are working.
In the cancer set of 39 tumor types, samples from a 112-year-old woman had to be excluded to avoid skewing the statistics.
Not published on arXiv. Here are its page, the PDF and the formalization: you can check it yourself, not only read our account.